A simple set; a spotlight, a single chair, and one figure – Heather Mitchell – a lone silhouette held in the quiet tension of the stage.
To write a work tracing the life and legacy of Ruth Bader Ginsburg, a woman who reshaped the very architecture of the American legal system, is no small ambition. Yet playwright, Suzie Miller, meets it with precision and perfection. Following sold-out seasons across Australia and a chorus of acclaim, the State Theatre Company of South Australia’s Adelaide performance of 'RBG: Of Many, One', arrives not burdened by expectation, but buoyed by it, and proves itself entirely worthy of the weight.
Heather Mitchell stands alone at the centre of the stage for the full hundred minutes, accompanied only by the quiet intrusion of a stagehand in darkness, slipping props in and out like passing thoughts. What unfolds is a performance of striking virtuosity and quiet devastation – a woman of such character it feels almost impossible to act out, let alone match. At times, you have to remind yourself you are witnessing an act of portrayal rather than a lived life, her performance is so vivid. From a young girl to the fragility in her old age, she traces the arc of Ruth Bader Ginsburg with raw emotional depth and precision, capturing not just the interchangeable moments in history but her inner life. Its weight, its clarity, its contradictions, as though it were drawn from her own emotional memory rather than a studied caricature in a script. While remaining deeply candid in her main-character role, Mitchell accurately responds with sharply observed impersonations of Obama, Clinton, and Trump in a series of lived political echoes.
In her hands, she holds a spiked, yellow-jewelled Banana Republic bib necklace – a replica of the one the judge herself wore while delivering both blistering dissents and measured judgments. These collars were never just adornment but rather, quiet acts of defiance; a way of carving identity into the uniformity of the robe, refusing the weight of a tradition cut to fit only men. They were the marks of her trade. She kneels down and places it eloquently into the imagination of a woman in the audience, asking her own judgement. In that small, astute gesture, we are reminded again of how this world was seen through a woman’s eyes – the very lens through which her life’s work was forged.
A young Ruth Bader Ginsburg grew up with a deep admiration for opera, a passion that followed her into adulthood and, in time, into cultural iconography. Beyond her role on the board of the Washington National Opera, she even stepped briefly onto the stage herself, appearing in small cameo roles. Paul Charlier’s score threads through her life like a memory made sound, weaving fragments of Verdi and Puccini into the shifting landscapes of her becoming. In a scene set within the stark simplicity of a gym in old age, her strength still quietly unyielding, the tone fractures and playfully moves into a cheeky collision of Mozart’s 'Magic Flute' and a nod to the rapper The Notorious B.I.G., whose name becomes entangled with her own as the 'Notorious RBG' – an accidental pop-culture mythology.
Throughout, Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde hums beneath the work, unresolved and aching just as the opera itself was written, refusing closure until its finale. In the movement before the curtain falls – “Mild und leise wie er lächelt”, gentle and soft, how he smiles – she takes her final breath with a world changed under her judgement.
After the show, what remains is a quiet sense of something fully seen. Through Suzie Miller’s writing and Heather Mitchell’s performance, Ruth Bader Ginsburg is held not only as history, but as presence – alive in voice, gesture, and conviction. The stage, crafted by David Fleischer and lit up by Alexander Berlage, strips everything back until what is left feels both intimate and immense; a life shaped by persistence, love, and an unrelenting belief in justice. As the spotlight fades on the prolific character, it is not closure that settles, but a lingering clarity of a woman who changed the world, and a world changed by her.
